CHAPTER VI

CHRISTIANITY

THEOLOGY AND DOGMA

Defenders of Christianity-The Logos-Christ-Irenæus-Monarchians -Basilides and Valentinus-Clement of Alexandria-The Theological System of Origen-The Great Persecutions-The Arian Controversy-Council of Nicæa-Revolt against its Creed-Councils of Seleucia-Ariminium-Reaffirmation of the Nicene Symbol -Nestorius and Eutyches: Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon -Monophysite Schisms.

THE writers who undertook the exposition and defence of Christianity for educated readers-the so-called Apologists were chiefly converted philosophers of a kind common in those days, half sophist, half rhetorician, who discoursed in public, or to paying hearers who frequented their lecture-rooms, on moral and religious subjects. They found in the new religion the true philosophy; it had the authority of divine revelation, and it gave the assurance of a blessed immortality. Christianity was to them primarily a revelation in the Scriptures and through Christ of the truth about God, of the moral law with its rewards and punishments, and of immortality through knowledge of the truth and obedience to the revealed will of God.

They endeavoured to prove that in its teaching about God Christianity was in accord with the best thought of the age, transcending it by carrying the thinking on under the guidance of revelation to its vaguely adumbrated consequences, and making practical application of its theology to religion and life. The superiority of Christianity to the old religions must be patent, they argued, to all intelligent men; and, lest any should fail to see it, they set out in a

glaring light the unreasonableness of polytheism and idolatry and the absurdities and immoralities of the myths-an enterprise in which they had many precursors among the Greeks as well as in Jewish controversial literature.

For the Apologists, as in the popular religious philosophies out of which they came, God was eternal, and in his unchangeable divinity too exalted to be brought directly into action in the changing world of things and men. Like Philo and the Gospel of John, they find the connection between God and the world in the idea of the Logos, which as divine reason was eternally immanent in God, and was emanated from God before creation, that through him the world might be made (Prov. 8, 22 ff.). The Logos is the Son of God, generated by his power and will, not as by a division of his essence. All revelation comes from him; it was he who appeared in human form to the patriarchs, he who spoke by the prophets. Nor was the work of the Logos confined to one people; whatever is reasonable and right in the teaching of Greek philosophers and poets is from the same source. The full revelation is made in the incarnate Logos. Combining Pauline (Colossians) and Johannean phraseology, Justin uses the name Christ of the Logos before the incarnation. The Logos, or the Christ-Logos, is thus a deity of the second order, numerically distinct from the Supreme God, but of one mind and will with him, emanated from God, or, in more scriptural phrase of the same meaning, generated by him. In this pluralistic monotheism the Spirit is sometimes distinguished from the Father and the LogosSon-an anticipation of the problem of the ontological Trinity, not of its solution.

The knowledge of God (yvŵois) is not in the Apologists an esoteric insight into the mysteries of the divine Being, as with the intellectual Gnostics, but a knowledge of God's unity, character, and will. Faith, that is, the acceptance of the Christian religion and obedience to its new law, is the condition of salvation. Salvation is deliverance from the assaults of demons, of which the world is full, and when this

life is over, immortality, or, as it is commonly expressed, "imperishability" (ap@apoía, "incorruption").1

In their notions of the hereafter the Apologists, contrary to what might be expected of philosophers with a streak of Platonism, accept, the beliefs of unphilosophical Christians, taking the resurrection in material literalness: “We expect to receive our bodies again after they are dead and laid in the ground." Justin, with all whose orthodoxy he regards as unequivocal, looks for a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth with a rebuilt and enlarged Jerusalem as his capital, after which will come the general resurrection and the last judgment, as in the Revelation of John.

Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons (d. ca. 200 A. D.) is in substantial agreement with the Apologists in his conception of the Logos, Son and revealer of the Father, who spoke by the prophets and was incarnate in Christ, and of the Spirit, as well as in his idea of faith (credere ei est facere eius voluntatem), the obligation of the moral law, free will and ability, and in his beliefs about the hereafter. He has, however, a more profound theory of the reason of the incarnation, the germs of which he may have brought from his native Asia Minor they are found in Ignatius-but the development of which was probably not uninfluenced by contact with the intellectual Gnostics and their doctrine of a fallen world.

God, by his Word (Logos), made Adam after his own likeness. This godlikeness, which included immortality, Adam, by his fall, lost for himself and all his descendants, who inherit his mortal nature; the recovery of the pristine likeness to God is therefore the condition of immortality; its possession is "imperishability." To this end the race must begin over again, with Christ as its head in place of Adam. By the union of divinity and humanity in Christ-a commixtio et communio dei et hominis-he undoes the harm

1 See 1 Cor. 15, 53. The preference for this word over ålavaola, "immortality," is due to the fact that in Greek philosophy lyveσdaι and p0elpeola are opposites, "come into existence," 'cease to exist."

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Adam did and restores to mankind the lost divine image. Only man could fairly overcome man's enemy, death; only God could give security of salvation; "unless man were made one with God, he could not share in incorruption." Against the Gnostic doctrine that the humanity of Christ was only a semblance, Irenæus affirms that he took from the Virgin Mary substantiam carnis; but with equal emphasis that the deity thus incarnated is "the Son, ever co-existent with the Father, uncreated, of the same essence" (óμooúσios). The union of deity with a real and true body of flesh and blood makes the body of man capable of immortality. The Gnostics, "despising the creation of God (the body) and rejecting the salvation of the flesh," think that when they die their souls will mount above the sky and go to that imaginary Father of theirs. Irenæus holds, on the contrary, that souls abide in an invisible place appointed by God until the resurrection; then receiving bodies and rising entire, that is, bodily,' they will thus come to see God. As for Ignatius the sacramental bread was a medicine that gives immortality, so in Irenæus the flesh which is nourished upon the body and blood of the Lord cannot be destined to destruction. After the invocation, the bread is no longer common bread, but a Eucharist, in which is a heavenly as well as an earthly element; so also our bodies, receiving the Eucharist, are no longer perishable, having the expectation of an eternal resurrection. It is through the sacrament that the salvation of the flesh is achieved.

The doctrine of the Logos seemed to thinkers imbued with the current religious philosophy to furnish a key to the understanding of the Scriptures, and to harmonise the church's worship of Christ as God with its polemic monotheism. There were others, however, to whom this discourse of a second god, the son of the first, begotten by him before the creation of the world-of Father and Son, or of Father, Son, and Spirit, as two, or three, numerically distinct divine beings had a familiar mythological sound 1 This is the Jewish doctrine. See above, pp. 55 f., 75.

which made the whole Logos theology suspicious; and this prejudice was doubtless strengthened by the resemblance of the emanation of the Son in this theology to the theories of the Gnostics. Attempts were therefore made to interpret the Gospels and the common faith of the church in a way more conformable to naïve monotheism. Some, rejecting the Fourth Gospel, held that Jesus was born of the Virgin, in accordance with the Father's will. He was a man of exemplary character and deeply religious. At his baptism the Spirit descended upon him, consecrated him as the Christ, and endued him with supernatural powers. Then and thus he became the Son of God in the Messianic sense, but not of divine nature. If it was permissible to attribute divinity to him, it was only after his resurrection and ascension, and only in a loose use of the word. This opinion, which closely resembles that of some of the Jewish Christian sects described above, was rejected by the church without further ado.

Others endeavoured to maintain at once the deity of Christ and the numerical unity of the godhead by the theory that it was God himself who became incarnate, and no other. One and the same God was both Father and Son, now invisible, now visible; now unbegotten, and again born of the Virgin; now impassible and immortal, now suffering and dying on the cross. A somewhat more developed theory taught that the one God assumed in succession different rôles (πрóσwжа, persona): in the character of Father he was the creator and legislator; in that of Son, from the incarnation to the ascension, he was the Saviour; in the present age he is the Spirit in the church. Thus, these scriptural names stand for modes or phases of God's operation or self-manifestation, not for a supreme God with one or two subordinate deities springing in some way out of him. Those who made the arithmetical unity of God (μovapxía)1 their shibboleth are commonly called "mo

1 Movapyla is the Greek word for "monotheism," or the doctrine of the divine unity.